Lying in State: Advice for American Poets

Listen I was born on a hill in 1986. / Year of the tiger, they tell me. Can I ask you a question, Americans? / Does your life look at all like this?Every now and again / are you summoned to visit a room?And yes you say to the summoner. / I will read you a poem in the room.In my youth, you begin / and shortly the reading is ended.But some nights you’re ambushed. / Some nights the room turns against you.Anyone have any questions, the summoner asks. / (Five gold teeth in his mouth.)What advice do you have, says a voice. / You know for American poets.I was born on a hill in 1986, you tell her. / Do I look like a man with advice.She wears a gold ring on a necklace. / Her saddleshoe laces are tucked.No your advice, says the summoner. / What advice will you give us tonight.

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1) You’re never going to prison for American poetry.

2) I defy the police to come find you for any lines you’ll write.

3) God sent me to die in the backstreets, wrote Sergei Esenin.

4) We might call this a terrorist’s line today.

5) I know a hundred ways to die, wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay.

6) And listen god wants nothing to do with me.

7) But I know a hundred ways to jail yourself here in America I’ll tell you a few.

8) You could buy yourself a ticket to Cameroon.

9) The second you step off the plane the police bludgeon you.

10) They suck their teeth and rummage through your belongings.

11) Such is their nature, they scheme up a story.

12) Look at this gold the poet stole from the gold fields, they’ll say.

13) This poet was bartering gold for guns and hollow point bullets.

14) Next it’s the papers: American Poet Plots Assassination of President.

15) He contrived to fire into the heart of our king, they’ll say.

16) And they’ll chain you up in darkness for thirty-one days.

17) They’ll toss you in prison for seven years in your country.

18) This happened to a poet last month in Africa while you were buying a scarf.

19) While you were checking your hair in the mirror you hung in your poem.

20) And besides you don’t need gold to get yourself guns you’re American.

21) And I know a hundred ways to jail yourself on the cheap here in America.

22) You could start huffing ether from torn-off scraps of your shirt, for instance.

23) You could knock on your neighbor’s door in the midst of a three-day binge.

24) It’s time, you tell him.

25) And the two of you vandalize a wall all night for free.

26) Write something on his wall.

27) Write something on her wall.

28) Isn’t that what your machine already tells you to do every day?

29) You could write many lines that have landed poets in jail outside America.

30) Our lives no longer feel ground beneath them, for instance.

31) When Stalin read this line he summoned the police to his study.

32) Drag Osip Mandelstam out of town by his scruff, he said.

33) Nadezhda, O’s wife: Give us a man, the police say, and we’ll make him a case.

34) And when they hauled O away she opened a trunk in their bedroom.

35) Piles and piles of O’s handwritten poems.

36) And Nadezhda commits them to memory when they sentence Osip to exile.

37) Well the police came for me when I was blackout with my neighbor.

38) We were vandalizing a wall in the false dawn in America.

39) Whatever else we were writing, we were not writing American poetry.

40) But often I dream of my neighbor and the life he’s living these days.

41) Often I dream of Esenin swinging from a pipe in the Hotel Angleterre.

42) I know a hundred lines I wish I’d written on that wall in the false dawn.